I have a new essay, in which I write,
I think that his posts have the potential to kick off discussions (which is a point category), but so far they have not done so. Perhaps this is a drawback to being paywalled.
Read the essay to its depressing conclusion.
You could maybe split it up that way. Tea Party masses, the largest base of the party. Old GOP elites and intellectuals, somewhat discredited and disconnected in the eyes of these masses. Then you have the rising intellectuals, who are not yet discredited but are almost as disconnected from the actual voters as the people they want to replace.
I recommend the entire post (the quote is from his response to a comment). Pointer from Tyler Cowen. The question in his blog post might be:
Can Trump-adjacent intellectuals connect with Trump supporters?
Greer argues in the negative, and so would I. The Trump-adjacent intellectuals are attached to elitist projects to make society in a conservative image, and that cannot be reconciled with populism in this country. Trump supporters are the descendants of what David Hackett Fischer called the Scots-Irish borderers, who are independent-minded and thus resistant to elite projects. Conservatives like Patrick Deneen or the Claremont crowd remind Greer of the Puritan strain, which the borderers detest.
In that sense, libertarian intellectuals are a better match for Trump supporters. The biggest disconnect between libertarian intellectuals and populists is on the issue of immigration. But there are other key differences. Libertarian intellectuals are, well, intellectual, and populists are not. Libertarian intellectuals disdain political heroes. Meanwhile, populists are fond of their Andrew Jacksons, Patrick Buchanans, and Donald Trumps. Libertarians are pacifist by philosophy, and populists are fighters by nature. Libertarians are globalist “anywheres” (they want to send vaccines to India) and populists are localist “somewheres.” (The anywhere/somewhere meme comes from David Goodhart.)
So I am skeptical of the ability of any intellectuals on the right to connect with the populists.
Intellectuals on the left, although they are an elite, are good at connecting to marginalized elements in society. They held on to the borderers for a long time by claiming to be their champions against Wall Street and by winking at Southern segregation, while in the North they claimed to be the champions of marginalized urban ethnics.
The borderers are now up for grabs, as Donald Trump was able to show. But today, elite intellectuals on the left are supplemented by an expanded class of the credentialed-but-not-educated (to borrow Glenn Reynolds’ term), who have college degrees yet work in professions that actually require little advanced knowledge of science or the humanities. These lumpenintellectuals, in coalition with blacks and others who identify as marginalized ethnics, make up a formidable Democratic voting block.
There was an old cartoon, popular among information technology professionals, in which someone says, “I don’t have a solution. But I admire your problem.” That is what I would say to conservative intellectuals these days.
In a summary, I write,
my vote for the most impressive item this week is the podcast with Glenn Loury and John McWhorter. Both of them demonstrated steelmanning twice (each one separately steelmans Kmele Foster at the end), with McWhorter also scoring two caveat points and one Open to changing his mind point.
Do you agree that this podcast showed two intellectuals at the top of their game?
This NYT column is a sandwich. It starts and ends with a denunciation of conservatives for continued support for Donald Trump and continued “flight 93” thinking. But in the middle are these two paragraphs:
Over the last decade or so, as illiberalism, cancel culture and all the rest have arisen within the universities and elite institutions on the left, dozens of publications and organizations have sprung up. They have drawn a sharp line between progressives who believe in liberal free speech norms, and those who don’t.
There are new and transformed magazines and movements like American Purpose, Persuasion, Counterweight, Arc Digital, Tablet and Liberties that point out the excesses of the social justice movement and distinguish between those who think speech is a mutual exploration to seek truth and those who think speech is a structure of domination to perpetuate systems of privilege.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Given an NYT audience, if you want them to pay attention to those paragraphs, wouldn’t you have to hide them in the sandwich?
Across much of the democratic world, philosophical liberals lack both the ideological self-confidence and the institutional base to stand up for their convictions. This is an existential crisis for the values of a free society. For only if philosophical liberalism can prove that it embodies a truly universal set of principles—one that can win adherents from Hyderabad to Hamburg, from Nairobi to New York—can it hope to retain and expand its influence in the 21st century.
His effort is a substack publication/community. I wish him well. I would like to believe that the number of Americans who are sympathetic to what Mounk calls philosophical liberalism is greater than the number who have adopted the religion that thrives on persecuting heretics.
Incidentally, with a separate post, Mounk scored the first point of the Fantasy Intellectual Teams May season.
M. V. Lee Badgett, Christopher S. Carpenter and Dario Sansone report,
Public attitudes and policies toward LGBTQ individuals have improved substantially in recent decades. Economists are actively shaping the discourse around these policies and contributing to our understanding of the economic lives of LGBTQ individuals.
From the Journal of Economic Perspectives (an important mainstream journal), as reported by Timothy Taylor, the long-time managing editor.
Let’s be clear. The Democratic Party was once the home of economists who, while rather too confident in their technocratic skills for my taste, at least understood how to add, subtract, and distinguish demand from supply. They would not have embarked on the dangerous, inflation-stoking efforts of the current Administration.
But contemporary economists are thriving. They are contributing to the study of LGBTQ! And the status of women in the profession is now a major concern!
I review Shelby Steele’s White Guilt.
In the United States, whites abused blacks for many decades. Legally, this abuse ended with the Civil Rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. But those acts did not erase the sordid history. Steele’s thesis is that sensitivity to this history produces white guilt and fuels black anger. The result is that blacks have become the abusers, and whites—liberal whites, especially—have become the abused.
Cass Sunstein and Tyler Cowen led their team to victory in the first Fantasy Intellectual Teams contest. The May contest is underway. Longer report here.
Weber insisted that to exercise real power, charismatic authority cannot keep relying on the spiritual calling of committed followers. It must establish its own structures of bureaucracy and tradition. According to Weber, this is how prophetic religious movements of the past created lasting regimes.
We seem to live in a time when various Weberian bureaucracies, notably those of the major political parties, have broken down. Meanwhile, new movements, as Martin Gurri points out, emerge without the Weberian elements. In that regard, Yuval Levin writes,
The frustrations that stand in the way of more effective bargaining and policy-making in Washington now add up to an argument for more explicit intra-party groupings that would negotiate with one another and with factions in the other party. But too few of the frustrated activists and politicians in both parties seem to see that, and so too few are engaged in building durable institutional structures for constructive factional engagement — at least beyond the level of rhetoric and communication strategy.
One can regard political activists, on either the left or the right, as crying because their demands are not being met. To the extent that their demands are reasonable, then more crying reflects greater sensitivity. If the left has reasonable demands, and they care about them, then that is a good thing. But if their demands are unreasonable, then this means that they are crybabies.